him to be and to do on earth.  The sackcloth and ashes of every patient Job will be turned into garments of praise; and the lamentations of every mourning Jeremiah into songs of gladness:  and in adoring wonder and unutterable joy, every head will be bowed down, every crown cast at Christ’s feet, and every heart will feel, and mouth confess, “He hath done all things well!” What an amazing disclosure will this be of the wisdom and love with which our gracious Lord has assigned to each servant his lot,—­given to each “his work,” and so prepared all things for him in the world, and so made all things work together for his good, that “the fruit has been holiness, and the end everlasting life!”

2.  But the Christian will also behold at judgment the excellence of Christ’s government over others, and over the whole world.

If we are such mysteries to ourselves, and if we cannot as yet truly write our own biographies, how much more perplexing to us is the personal history of any other in his relation to the Redeemer!  How impossible to discover the reasons of all, or of any, of Christ’s providential dealings with him, or to read aright any one day in his life!  Was it possible for Job’s friends to interpret, at the time, Job’s sufferings?  God alone could have corrected Jacob when, in the dark night of his sorrow, yet just before the daybreak of his joy in Egypt, he cried, “Joseph is not, Simeon is not, and will ye take Benjamin away?—­all these things are against me!” Daniel in the lions’ den, or the three young men in the furnace, with a wicked king in peace upon the throne; John the Baptist in the dungeon, with Herod in the banquet hall; Stephen falling asleep beneath the shower of cruel stones, and Saul gazing complacently at the murderers’ clothes laid at his feet:—­these, and a thousand other such incidents in human history, are, to beholders, involved in a portion of that darkness which hung over the cross of Christ itself, at the time, a mystery of mysteries to all who witnessed its agonies!  But when, from the history of persons, we rise to the contemplation of the history of cities, countries, and nations; or ascend to a still higher region in order to take in, if possible, the history of the human race from age to age; and to comprehend what Jesus Christ has done for it, and how He has governed it,—­how much more profound is the darkness!  If, for instance, we endeavour to form any estimate of the effect which has been produced upon the character and destiny of mankind by the present structure of the physical earth, with its mountains, seas, rivers, winds, and climate—­the house which Jesus Christ has built and furnished for His creatures; by the famines and pestilences, wars and conquests, migrations and settlements, arising out of circumstances more or less controlling man, and beyond his will; as well as by all that has come, as it were, directly from Jesus, through His Church, from Eden till this present hour;—­how infinite